You are not going to walk away from here with any answers. Get angry at me. Go ahead. Some night, many years from now, maybe Aaliyah will choose to explain what happened, but for now you have to accept what you have seen. You no longer need to worry about Aaliyah. Aaliyah is on her own. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained shaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence differently. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application. No account of the Universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness disregarded. How to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

First I met Conrad in a hotel in Athens. To say I met him is not quite accurate—I was first attracted by his laugh as he stood near his elevator. I turned to observe him, but my eyes were still blinded by the dazzling light from the street. I had just crossed Constitution Plaza in the heart of Athens, and the midmorning Sun, reflected from the concrete pavement beneath my feet and the ivory-colored Pentelicus marble of the marble of the buildings on all sides of the Plaza, had rendered my eyes almost useless. There is no spot in the World quite so bright as Athens on a July morning. The tends of thousands of beautiful houses, some pink or yellow-tinted, toss the Sunlight back, back, forth and forth like mirrors. Even the mountains lying low around the city like a great horseshoe added their glowing yellow-brown to the warmth, and the endless stretch of blue sky is rarely broken by clouds. The few cypress trees and palms only add to the oppressiveness of the light, for their yellow-green is overpowered until it becomes almost the color of the Sun. Still one cannot resist raising one’s eyes to have a look at the Acropolis rising on its long battlements just a half mile to the left above the Plaza. There the broken columns of the Parthenon stand in wounded dignity against the sky, giving a splendid impression of the colors which make Greece—gold and blue. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Standing for a moment in the lobby of the Hotel Mediterranean Plaza, I blinked to adjust my eyes to the dusky interior. It was then that I heard Conrad laugh. His laughter was full, not raucous like that of most Greek boys, and somewhat humble as befits a boy who lives in hotels, as though he were expecting you to laugh with him. I noticed his long rows of teeth, shining and perfect, and his nice mouth. His face was perfectly chiseled, and his laughter accentuated his cheek bones. His golden hair, brilliant and thick, was brushed back over his head in the pompadour style which used to be so popular among American boys. He must have been about fifteen at the time, but because of his slim build he appeared younger than his age—a kind of man and boy in one. I never did learn the cause of his laughter that morning; I merely looked at him with half a smile and accepted his courtesies as he asked my floor and let me off the elevator with those effusive “sirs” by which the Greeks show politeness. However, I noticed a book opened and turned upside down in his hands, the Dramas of Sophocles. Later as I sat in my room writing, gazing out into the shared patio at the rear of the hotel, I thought how Conrad resembled my own younger brother back in America. Except the reading of Sophocles—I marveled at that. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

It would have surprised me to know then that this laughing boy would be in a few years picking his way through the fir trees of Albanian mountains. One evening, two weeks later, I came across him sitting on a bench in the Plaza, and I heard a story which has remained deeply etched in my memory ever since. I sat down beside him, partly because I was curious to learn more about this boy and partly because I wised to enjoy the refreshing loveliness of the evening. Summers evenings in Athens, when for two hours after Sundown (Sun changing angles in the sky) they sky plays with shades of pink and turquoise, can be as invigorating as the days are stifling. A languid breeze comes up from the Bay of Salamis, loaded with rich fragrance which has been accumulating in the drying, semi-tropical vegetation on the island of Aegina several miles out in the bay. The breeze brings with it an occasional pungent odor from the harbor of the Piraeus. Music seems to carry farther on such an evening, and the sporadic taxi horns did not clash too cacophonously with we could hear Ready Between the Lines by Aaliyah emerging from a restaurant at the far end of the Plaza. I had often sat on this bench, letting myself be lulled by the lazy movement of palm fingers moving in and out of the darkness above my head, then turning to watch the lights come on way up Mt. Lycabettus. I often counted the stars as they sprang out with a brilliance possible only in the transparent atmosphere of Mediterranean countries. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Conrad had been reading a book before the Sun had set, and he answered my question about what he was reading with his irrepressible laugh that accompanied every utterance, humorous or not. “The history, sir of the Persian Wars, sir.” That curious “sir” twice in one sentence! It did seem to me that they overdid their courtesy. “You find it interesting?” “O yes sir, yes sir! One of my ancestors fought at Thermopylae. His name was Argyros, and he was a very brave  man.” “You do not believe, Conrad, that the ancient Greeks who fought those Persians were the same race as the modern Greeks, do you?” I baited him. “O yes, yes sir!” he cried earnestly, using the word malista which carries a strong affirmation like our English certainly. “I come from Asia Minor,” he went on so quickly that he stammered, “from Asia Minor, sir, the Ionian Greeks lived there, and they are the descendants directly from the Greeks who fought at Thermopylae.” “How did they get over to Asia Minor?” “The people of the Peloponnesus, sir, migrated to Asian Minor. Our family lived in the Peloponnesus in ancient times. My great ancestors went with the Spartan army under Leonidas to fight at Thermopylae. He was one of the three hundred who stayed to hold the pass for three days so they would have time to fortify Athens. He died there. My father often told me about our ancestor Argyros. Then many years later the Greeks from the Peloponnesus made a colony in Asia Minor.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

 Conrad was spouting this history like a religious faith. I knew it was fairly dubious—modern Greeks are mainly Slavic in race, and historians do not know where the glorious races of the ancient Hellenes ended. However, I saw there was no use arguing ethnology with the zealous Conrad, and furthermore I did want to pump him up about himself. Rather than speaking of measured intelligence that is stable for the individual over time because it is defined as the ratio of mental age to chronological age, we shall speak of intelligence as the content of what is intellected and the developing capacities for further intellection. In this sense of the term, intelligence is continuously growing for both the individual and the species; it is meaningful to say that we are more intelligent than we were a few years ago, and that our children will be more intelligent than we are. Something of the sort has indeed been happening in the development of the increasing superiority of mortals over other organisms and their increasing scope in comprehending the World about them and themselves. Although we are on unsure speculative ground in attempting to identify the crucial stages in the evolution of consciousness, we may at any rate guess that Homo sapiens gradually differentiated themselves from the family of Hominidae by acquiring the ability not only to use tools but to use tools to make tools, an accompanying awareness of superior adaptability occurred. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Conrad went on to tell me about the massacres of 1922. “Almost every Greek in our town was killed. You do not know, sir, about those massacres?” I did know something of the war between Turkey and Greece in 1922, which ended with the terrible battle of Smyrna when the city was brined, and the Greek army with thousands of refugees was driven right into the sea and would have been annihilated, had it not been from the timely assistance of some British warships that picked up those who could swim or get hold of boats. However, evidently Conrad was thinking of something else. “We lived in the town of Merzifoun, way back near the Caucasus. I was a small boy then, but I remember the town well. Almost all the people were Greeks—the only Turks around were government officials. They did not bother us much and we had a happy life. My father used to ride about the country on horseback buying tobacco to sell to American companies. He sometimes took me riding with him on his trips—I would sit on the old horse behind him. There were not many towns in our province, you see, only barren hills and plateaus. When we arrived in a village the men were always glad to see my father. They would take him to the café and sit at the tables in the street and drink Turkish coffee and a little ouzo and laugh and talk. These were Greeks, sir, the Turks in the village would stand around smiling; they always seemed sour at something. However, my father got along with them well, he never quarreled with them, and he used to greet them cheerfully and offer them cigarettes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

“The Turks would sit at their own café, never talking or laughing like my father and his friends, only silently smoking their long waterpipes. I used to sit at the edge of the street a little way from my father’s table and watch those Turks smoking. Have you seen those Turkish pipes, sir?” “Yes,” I answered. Then I added, “You must have been very fond of your father.” “I loved him very much,” said Conrad. The boy was not sitting moodily, looking out across the Plaza toward the sparkling lights on Mt. Lycabettus, and he went on talking not as a student to an Amerikanos but as one human being to another. “The happiest memories of my whole life are those trips I took with my father. Oh, we had good enough times at home, my mother and two sister and I. However, how I loved to go with my father! As we were riding the many hours between villages he would tell me stories of the ancient Greeks, how the Persians came down with a huge army and the Athenians fought them at Marathon and drove them into the sea and killed so many that the mound where they are buried looks like a mountain. And he told me about Leonidas the Spartan general who made the stand at Thermopylae. That was when my father would speak about Argyros, our great ancestor. I used to be filled with pride I almost burst when I heard how my ancestor had volunteered to stay with the three hundred soldiers in the narrow pass in the mountains, and how he fought there even through the Persian arrows were so thick the hid the Sun. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

“Then my father would tell me about the shepherd traitor who took the Persians around by a secret pass to attack Leonidas and the Spartans from the rear, and my anger would boil up and my father would laugh as I clenched my fists. However, he was proud that I begged to hear those stories over and over again. And he used to say, ‘Conrad, never forget that your great ancestor was Argyros’.” The boy was talking so animatedly now, his hands gesturing aimlessly around in the dark. In the dim lights of the Plaza lamps I got a glimpse of his black eyes dancing with delight at these boyhood memories. However, suddenly he sat quietly, vacantly, his face sober and his jaw heavily set. In the realm of suffering, affliction is something apart, specific, and irreducible. It is quite a different thing from simple suffering. It takes possession of the soul and marks it through and through with its own particular mark. Affliction is inseparable from physical suffering and yet quite distinct. With suffering, all that is not bound up with physical pain or something analogous is artificial, imaginary, and can be eliminated by a suitable adjustment of the mind. Even in the case of the absence or death of someone we love, the irreducible part of the sorrow is akin to physical pain, a difficulty in breathing, a constriction of the heart, an unsatisfied need, hunger, or the almost biological disorder caused by the brutal liberation of some energy, hitherto directed by an attachment and now left without a guide. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

At some very early point too must have some the kind of self-awareness that makes death an important subjective fact, an awareness which, coupled with primitive awe or bewilderment at the fact of being, serves as the basis of magic and religion. Some even believe there were another form of primates, from the British Iles, who looked human, but were far more intelligent, extremely naïve, and lacked aggression. Being far less aggressive than humans by nature, they lost out to the new species, and were scattered and went into hiding. They pretended to be humans. These primates concealed their birthing rites, but coupling with humans did happen. And unbeknownst to early civilizations, they developed a kind of human who carried a giant helix of genes, twice the number of a normal human. There were legends about their spirits in Louisiana. They were so powerful some thought the spirits has the psychic powers to possess unborn fetus who shared their DNA and be reborn with it. As animism grew more subtle in its personifications, mythic explanations of the origin of things became possible, and human-like gods were created. The passage to the idea of a single god, originated or at least dramatized by Akhnaton, led, by linkage to the god of the Israelites, to the idea of Christ. Meanwhile the development of a conscious science (essentially, the evolution of canons of evidence for belief in the regularity of events in nature) had occurred, beginning with the Meletians in early Greece. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Perhaps it is not too fanciful to suggest that the analogue to the achievement of early mortals in making tools to make tools is the scientific method: not just knowing how to learn but knowing how to make sure we know.  These twin achievements, separated by at least a hundred thousand years, are the fundaments f technology and science. They increased vastly the range of what might be intellected as well as the capacities for intellection. Scientific thought itself then produced several radical developments in mortal’s self-awareness: the Copernican revolution, showing us something of the place of our Earth in the Universe; the Darwinian revolution, showing us something of our place in organic evolution; and what I shall call the Cartesian-Freudian revolution, for Dr. Freud completed what Descartes began, showing us the existence of vast reaches of mind beyond our conscious, rational mental processes. Hundreds of geniuses of the life of the psyche had of course known and expressed intuitively before Dr. Freud the mysteries of the unconscious; his achievement was simply the climax of an increasingly popular development in European thought. Dr. Freud had shown quite convincingly the idea of the unconscious was conceivable around 1700, topical around 1800, and effective around 1900. By 1950 its exploration by individuals through psychoanalysis could be described as commonplace. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

What we are witnesses today is the easy accessibility and mass distribution of means for producing experience of the usually unexperienced aspects of mental functioning. With the use of chemical technology made available to the millions the experience of transcendence of the individual ego, which a century was available only to the disciplined mystic. However, there are, of course, more varied phenomena than the feeling of ego-transcendence produced by mind altering substances, and there are more motives than the religio-mystical motive lying behind the present widespread use of psychotropic substances. The claim that psychotropic substances expand the consciousness refers to changes in several dimensions of experience. Persons interested in the experience primarily for reasons of esthetic appreciation or expression, or for its intrinsic novelty may or may not be artists, but their attitude toward experience tends to be perceptually open and non-judgmental. These individuals especially seek and enjoy the perceptual changes, such as increased vividness of color, visual harmonies, change in depth perception, sharper definition of detail, synesthesias, change in time sense (especially when listening to music), increased volume of unusual imagery, and so on. The effects are, as we have noted, not always beautiful, and in fact may be quite unpleasant: hellish experience, for instance, features garish or horrible colors (sickly greens, ugly dark reds, poisonous orange), or sometimes an impression of threatening blackness accompanied by feelings of doom and gloom and isolation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The person’s perception of one’s own body may become unpleasant: one’s limbs may seem to be distorted or flesh decaying; in a mirror one’s face may seem to be distorted or eyes blank, reflecting a meaningless emptiness at the self’s center; all attempts at communication may seem a mockery, the shell of the self a prison from which there is no exit. Yet even the negative; surrealism has in fact accustomed us to just such visions of the World. Among the esthetic adepts there is even a phrase for the negative experience when it occurs: it is known as “paying your taxes.” In this a group of users, only a boor would complain of a bad trip. Their goal is novel experience for its own sake. Some think this is how Judy Chicago came of with The Dinner Party, how Frida Kahlo invented Las Dos Fridas. Psychotropic substances were also thought to have influenced the work of Andy Warhol, which some think is evident in his paintings like Shot of Marilyns, Self Portrait, Triple Elvis, Race Riot, Prince, Rorschach, and many more. Of course, Andy Warhol is one of the most prolific popular culture artists in modern times. Rock Guitar singer and song writer Jimi Hendrix was also thought to be under these psychotropic substances which lead to some of his most popular songs: Purple Haze (where he talks about trying to escape some reality), All Along the Watchtower (which could also be a religio-mystical song), Little Wing, Hear My Train Coming, and many more. And while Bill Gates was stealing computer time, The Beatles were thought to also be under the influence as well as groups like The Animals. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Altered states of consciousness has been thought of as ways to produce some of the most creative work in the World, but some people never come down or in other words, spend a life time paying their taxes, or they perish. Some even have reported that their girlfriend’s eyes turned yellow and she had snakes for hair. Some use the substances primarily for religious experience, whether in their own search for transcendent meaning or out of an interest in the psychology of religion or its philosophical bases. It may produce a feeling of oneness with the Universe and a reduction or complete loss of the sense of personal identity. A few have thought to, while in fascinosum or tremendum, feel a sense of joy, gratitude, pleasure, or onrush of grace, at catching a glimpse of the Ultimate, or numen; the tremendum is a reaction of awe, horror, fear, or a feeling of being overwhelmed. As in the esthetic experience, both the negative and the positive are seen as valid and therefore endurable. Others use psychotropic drugs as a cure for alcoholism. People who have used psychotropic drugs because they are disturbed or potentially suicidal or psychotic have reported it fails to produce a breakthrough and leaves them feeling hopeless and in an even chaotic psychic state than before. A certain number of persons have in essence already quit life and are simply looking for something to carry them over the edge to oblivion. These are rare cases, of course, but they do provide the headlines when they come to grief. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Keep in mind, also, that laws make the possession and knowing use of the psychedelic or unauthorized use of psychotropic drugs a crime because they are known to be habit forming, and may not be safe for use for some people and can lead to death. Psychologists and psychiatrists are working closely with student groups both to educate them to the dangers of the situation and to understand what is going on. A major problem arising from the new laws is that civil authority thus becomes alienate from young people who have great potential for contributing to the society of the future. In a healthy society, the intellectually able and creative citizens serve to vivify and support the social authority; but if they are defined as enemies of society for pursuing activities that they consider constructive, they will incorporate in the personal identity significant elements of anti-sociality. Many people are looking for new relationships between the individual and the state, and the development also of new social institutions to replace marriage and the family. These young people feel very keenly about the invasion of privacy by the police and by state information-collectors. They seek a human nature which will be free of the tyranny of the machine. These individuals do not want to be on a space journey where the new is using their imagination. Another recurring themes in this group is that history is ending, or sometimes, less cosmically, that Christianity is ending. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Some indeed say that the World is about to end, and that the expansion of consciousness is isomorphic with the expansion of the physical Universe; that both will fall back to the center simultaneously and instantaneously, and will vanish in a trice. Still others see the World as ending in a nuclear explosion. Whatever the vision, the World as we know it now, for example, modern society, is seen as fleeting, perishable, not viable. And it does no good to ask what rearrangement of things as they are is being proposed by these youth; nothing is being proposed, and they see it as the nature of the case that nothing can be proposed. You can ask a person to imagine pink elephants or rhinoceroses with horses’ heads or skyscrapers that walk and talk, but you cannot ask him or her to imagine an unknown primary color. There is a new time coming, and we will know what it is when it happens. Pour us your poison that it may renew our strength. Fire burns our brains. Now let us leap—Heaven or Hell, what matter?—into the deep, at the bottom of the Unknown to find the new. The motive for this sort of exploration of the potentialities of the mind is an extraordinarily powerful one. It is in essence highly idealistic and moral, regardless of its associations with behaviors that much of society many consider immoral. Indeed, it may even arise in part because of the basic human need to feel worthwhile through knowing that one is behaving responsibly and in a way that makes sense to others. Be a person on whom nothing is lost. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

A new mortality must be created—realization of depth or heights of the self for which no words exist. Express the value of sensitive and unforgetting attention. The great act of attention is all-inclusive; the more of life that is remembered and brought to bear upon the present movement in living expression, the more fully conscious a person is declared to be. As you might expect, this dimension is rather difficult to define. I can only appeal from my introspection to your introspection in offering it for consideration. What I mean here is something akin to Plato’s idea of the musical unconscious, or as he also called it, the spiritual unconscious. Be the magic power of this immense midnight at the crossroads of your senses, be the purport of their strange meeting. The sensitivity to the breadth of consciousness of others, includes animals and nature. This also involves a recognition of the game character of social interaction and personal relationship: at a low level, an awareness of the games people play, including oneself of course, and at a high level an appreciation of mythic enactment in human affairs, the extent to which the roles that are possible to us because of our evolutionary history find expression in any given time-stretch in out lives. I would not be willing to say consciousness has been expanded or extended unless it could be shown to be so when the person is in his or her normal state, free of drug effect. In brief, my view is that the intact ego, in which all the capacities of mind are used to the fullest, is the best vehicle we have for bring ourselves into valid and discriminating relationship with the protean forms of reality. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The evolutionary task, in the individual and in the species, is to create an ego that itself capable of including the states of consciousness now called paranormal. The states the psychedelic and psychotropic drugs produce should not themselves be confused with expanded consciousness. That comes later, if it comes at all, when and if the experience of unusual realities is brought into the ego and the ego itself is thereby enlarged in scope.  A corollary of this is that the ego already possessed of considerable scope is more likely to be able to use such an experience further to grow and enlarge itself, just as it is the stronger ego that can use psychotherapy more effectively. A sorrow that is not centered around an irreducible core of such a nature is mere romanticism or literature. Humiliation is also a violent condition of the whole corporal being, which longs to surge up under the outrage but is forces, by impotence or fear, to hold itself in check. On the other hand pain that is only physical is a very unimportant matter and leaves no trace in the soul. Toothache is an example. An hour or two of violent pain caused by a decayed tooth is nothing once it is over. It is another matter if the physical suffering is very prolonged or frequent, but in such a case we are dealing with something quite different from an attack of pain; it is often an affliction. “God shall consecrate thine affliction for thy gain,” reports 2 Nephi 2.2. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all you know on Earth, and all you need to know. Beauty is the eternal splendor of the One showing through the Many. That is, in the many different forms in our Universe, the One shines through and gives splendor and meaning to all. This holds good as far as many are concerned at any rate, for most never hesitate in their choice of attitude; it leads people to adopt the Christian attitude as the only possible one. Several people are born, grow up, and always remain within the Christian inspiration. When considering the great trilogy of Beauty, Truth and Goodness, we often place Beauty at the top because Beauty is harmony, and whether Truth or Goodness are harmonious is the test of their integrity. Goodness gives a person self-respect, Truth gives gratification, but Beauty gives peace and joy simultaneously. Goodness, or ethics, consists of acting in a way that is harmonious with our fellow human beings, and this makes the action testable by its beauty. Much confusion exists today about the roles of men and women. We tend to be uncertain about what it means to be a man or a woman, and this uncertainty adds to the fears that keep us from knowing, accepting, and affirming ourselves. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

At one time in our history little confusion existed concerning these roles, for there was a rather clear social expectation. The man was expected to be the head of the home. When a final decision was to be made concerning important matters affecting the family, it was his responsibility to make that decision. If he chose to consult his wife for her opinion that was fine and gentlemanly of him, but he was not required by social custom to do so. Now, even in those days—some might say “good old days”!—women probably were the real rulers in the home more often than the men would have cared to admit. However, at any rate there was a social standard that man should have dominion over woman. However, times have changed and we now even have Internal Women’s Day to honor the achievements of women. Our society granted women the right to vote. Increasingly it gave them additional legal rights. In times of national emergency it encouraged them to work, and they made themselves so indispensable that many of them continued to work when the emergency was over. Gradually, virtually all professions were opened up to them. Equal educational opportunities became available to them and they increasingly took advantage of them. With all these changed taking place it was inevitable that the woman’s role, and man’s too, within the home and in relationship to each other would change. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

However, in what ways? As so often occurs in times of social transition, the old ways tended to be abandoned without a clear definition as to what the new would be. As others have pointed out, certain periods of history are characterized by particular forms of neurotic behavior. A good case can be made for believing that our basic neurosis, our fear of love, has been expressed  in many of our reactions to the shifting roles of men and women that occurred in the rush to fill the vacuum created by the changing times. Although the changes unquestionably opened the door to the possibility of new and exiting opportunities for emotional closeness between men and women never widely experienced before, we have frequently avoided this dangerous intimacy. Some of us reacted in extreme ways against the former roles. Others avoided the hopeful possibilities with more or less desperate attempts to cling to the old ways in male-female interaction while the World moved on. When women overact against the old system, it often means turning to a strongly competitive role in relation to men, sometimes subtly, sometimes openly, expressed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

The woman often appears to make a fetish, suggesting a deep insecurity about herself, of proving to the World, and probably most of all to herself, that she is not only the equal of any man but also superior to most. She may even attempt to dominate men as men dominated women in the past. This approach to life often leads to a de-feminization, which creates a veneer of hardness that seems to defy any man to attempt genuine intimacy with the woman. She may not shy away from physical closeness, for part of her platform of equal rights may well include a revolt against the double standard and a frenzied effort to prove that she is as free as any male. However, her fear of domination, her mistrust of herself and of her partner, may make it impossible for her to allow herself to experience genuine warmth and affection for a man. Strong reactions against feelings of dependency are often involved. All of us—men as well as women—have desires to be take care of, protected, and sheltered by another loving person. However, the woman who is afraid she may not be able to avoid domination is very threatened by such feelings. She may go to great lengths to suppress and even deny to herself these feelings of need for another woman. Some women feel that by enjoying a relationship with a man that they are giving up some of their independence to him, and it can cause them great anguish to have to release some of their power they worked so hard to achieve. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

In some cases, women actually deny their desires for a man and these struggles are so serious that they can cause her emotional and physical harm, as she may take the issues out on herself. This is why some women are cold, or seem unemotional. For men, overreaction against the old ways often leads to a near abdication of any meaningful role in the home. Convinced that one dare not dominate the home, he may abandon all leadership and leave the administration of home, household finances, and the discipline, education, and open expression of love of his children to his wife as her exclusive sphere of activity. Of course other factors, such as modern industrialization and our commuting ways, which often make the man’s workaday World a vastly different existence far separated from the home, both physically and psychologically, have encouraged this trend. The result is that, in the home, where the man might hope for emotional intimacy with a wife and children, he often seems, and may even adopt the role of, an inferior, bumbling, ineffectual creature who is a nonentity at best and at worst someone who disrupts the efficient routine that his wife has in operation when he is not around. He may feel like an outsider. While this may appear to be a caricature of American males today, there are many who fit the picture and many more who tend in that direction—men who appear to be afraid to be genuine persons in relation to their wives and children. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

Furthermore, our society appears likely to proceed further in that direction since a snowballing effect can be observed. Since family life is increasingly centered around women, it spears that girls are likely to emulate their mothers. Boy, on the other hand, confronted with a dominant mother image and a largely absent and apparently weak father, are likely to identify with the dominant mother and become increasingly feminized, and yet at the same time be frightened of women, who for them seem all-powerful. As one man put it, “I have never won an argument with a woman in my life! They are so good at repartee.” Another man, speaking of his wife, said, “When we fight, she has the supreme court behind her and I have new Lawyer from New York Law who just passed the bar exam.” This changing role of men is likely to lead to many symptoms of emotional disturbance. The man may express his fear of women and his (perhaps largely unconscious) rage by becoming impotent. He may turn toward homosexuality, as he seeks to satisfy his need for some kind of intimacy with follow males, who pose less threat to his damaged sense of personal identity. He may make conquests of pleasures of the flesh with women, in his workaday World, that involve little genuine intimacy. He may even adopt any one of many distancing devices, since the fear of love is magnified by his perspective of women. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

The woman, of course, is in a similar bind. For as the man tends in various ways to withdraw from her, her, own protective devices come into play. Without quite knowing what is going on, she feels frustrated, hurt, and abandoned. The risks of expressing love and understanding seems too great, so she goes on her way, substituting control and irritable nagging for the love she longs to give and receive, but which she fears. Vanity and narcissism—the compulsive needs to be admired and praised—undermine one’s courage, for one of them fights on someone else’s conviction rather than one’s own. When one act to gain someone else’s praise, furthermore the act itself is a living reminder of the feeling of weakness and worthlessness: otherwise there would be no need to haughtily display one’s attitude. This often leads to the cowardly feeling which is the most bitter humiliation of all—the humiliation of having co-operated knowingly in one’s own vanquishment. It is not so bad to be defeated because the enemy is stronger, or even to be defeated because one did not fight; but to know one was a coward because one chose to sell out one’s strength to get along with the victor—this betrayal of one’s self is the bitterest pill of all. There are also specific reasons in our culture why acting to please others undermines courage. For such acting, at least for men, often means playing the role of one who is unassertive, unaggressive, gentlemanly, and how can one develop power, including sexual potency, when one is supposed to be unassertive? #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

With women, too, these ways of gaining admiration militate against the development of their indigenous potentialities, for their potentialities are never exercised or even brought into the picture. The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one’s own convictions—not obstinately or defiantly (these are expressions of defensiveness not courage) nor as a gesture of retaliation, but simply because these are what one believes. It is as though one were saying through one’s actions, “This is myself, my being.” Courage is the affirmative choice, not a choice because “I can do no other”; for if one can do no other, what courage is involved? To be sure, at times one has simply to cling with dogged determination to a position one has won through courage. Such times are frequent in therapy when a person has achieved some new growth and must then withstand the counterattack of anxious reaction within oneself as well as the attacks of friends and family members who would be more comfortable if he had remained the way he was. There will be plenty of defensive actions at best; but if one has conquered something worth defending, then one defends it not negatively but with joy. When in a person’s development courage begins to emerge—that is, when the person begins to break out from the pattern of devoting one’s life to getting others to admire him or her—an intermediate step generally occurs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

The person in this intermediate stage takes independent stands, to be sure, but they defend their actions at the court in which the laws are written by the very authorities they have been trying to please. It is as though they demanded the right to be free, but, like the American colonists before the Revolution, they have to argue their case on the basis of laws written by those from whom they demanded their rights. People in therapy in this stage often dream literally of trying to persuade their parents of the justice of their case, of the right to be themselves. It may well be that this stage is the farthest that many people reach in their development toward freedom and responsibility. However, in the final analysis this halfway station leaves the person in a hopeless dilemma: for in granting one’s parents or parental substitutes the right to draft the laws, and in arguing before their court, one has already tacitly admitted their sovereignty. This implies one’s lack of freedom, and one’s guilt if one asserts one’s freedom. The hardest step of all, requiring the greatest courage, is to deny those under whose expectations one has lived the right to make the laws. And this is the most frightening step. It means accepting responsibility for one’s own standards and judgments, even though one knows how limited and imperfect they are. This is what we mean by the courage to accept one’s finiteness—which is the basic courage every human must have. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

Accepting our finiteness is the courage to be and trust one’s self despite the fact that one is finite; it means acting, loving, thinking, creating, even though one knows one does not have the final answers, and one may well be wrong. However, it is only from a courageous acceptance of finitude, and a responsible acting thereon, that one develops the powers that one does possess—far from absolute though they may be. To do this presupposes the many sides of the development of consciousness of self which we have discussed, including self-discipline, the power to do the valuing, the creative conscience, and the creative relation to the wisdom of the past. Obviously this step requires a considerable degree of integration, and the courage it requires is the courage of maturity. For those who live as they should, passing away is the instant when, for an infinitesimal fraction of time, pure truth, unassisted, certain, and eternal, enters the soul. Life leading to this good is not only defined by a code of morals common to all, but also consists of a succession of acts and events strictly personal to one, and is essential to one who leaves them on one side never reaching the goal. Even when people are faced with inward darkness, one must have the everlasting conviction that any human being, even though practically devoid of natural faculties, can penetrate to the kingdom of truth reserved for genius, as long as one longs for truth and perpetually concentrates all one’s attention upon it attainment. One thus becomes a genius too. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

Under the name of truth, we also include beauty, virtue, and every kind of goodness, as it is a conception of the relationship between grace and desire. The Christian idea of love for one’s neighbor is a form of justice and it is so beautiful. The duty of acceptance in all that concerns the will of God, whatever it may be, is impressed on the minds of many, as it is a duty we cannot fail in without dishonoring ourselves. This experience enables us to get a better understanding of the possibility of loving divine love. It is a beautiful love that one can experience with all of one’s soul and bear witness to the tenderness it enshrines. It is as if Christ comes down and takes possession of one. It allows for in the midst of suffering to feel the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms. Give beauty in the inward mortal, and may the outward and inward mortal be at one. The timelessness of beauty saves us from worshipping at the shrine of progress, or kneeling at the altar to pray that tomorrow we will make more money than today, and the future will be better than the past, until we are caught up in the sordid merry-go-round that makes it impossible for us to appreciate the delicious calm of a moment of timelessness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

Beauty has nothing to do with progress. Who will be so rash as to proclaim that our present buildings are more beautiful than the Parthenon? Or our present churches more beautiful than Chartres? Or our present dishware more beautiful than Greek vases? Or modern music better than Mozart and Bach? Beauty is beyond the confines of progress. Progress must not be identified with evolution, a very different thing. Even evolution does not guarantee that our species and our World are getting better and better; many species have been dropped out, and why should we be evolutions darling? The one thing we can be sure about is the timelessness of beauty. Let us, as Walter Pater entreats us, seek the desire for beauty, the experience of poetic passion, the love of art, the highest quality of each moment for its own sake. The great explosion of creativity which occurred in Fifth Century Greece has bequeathed to us an endlessly rich mine of beauty in which to spend precious hours and days in the company of great spirits. The Greeks were willing to live and die for beauty. It is fascinating to note how the scientists have kept alive the sense of beauty since Grecian times. The astronomer Kepler believed his discoveries were in direct line with Pythagoras, and that the revolution of the planets around the Sun was beautiful in the same sense as the vibrations of a violin string are beautiful. No wonder he spoke of the harmony of sphere, and broke out in a cry of joy, “I thank thee, Lord God our Creator, that thou allowest me to see the beauty in thy work of creation.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

Kepler also wrote, “Mathematics is the archetype of the beauty of the World.” Researchers of physics recognize truth by the splendor of its beauty. After this I came to feel that Plato was a mystic, that all the Iliad is bathed in Christian light, and that Dionysus and Osiris are in a certain sense Christ himself; and my low was thereby redoubled. We mistaken assume that beauty is passive, which is no doubt the influence of our culture which does not have time to listen to the active powers of beauty. However, listening is an active process. Every since Plato, beauty has been experienced by the sensitive persons as an active agent: it is the sign of the splendor of truth, and it speaks out through this splendor to the mathematicians, physicists, and all those who listen patiently. The effect of this practice is extraordinary and surprises me every time, for, although I experience it each day, it exceeds my expectation at each repetition. At times the very first words tear my thoughts from my body and transport it to a place outside space where there is neither perspective nor point of view. The infinity of the ordinary expanses of perception is replaced by an infinity to the second or some third degree. At the same time, filling every part of this infinity of infinity, there is silence, a silence which is not an absence of sound but which is the object of a positive sensation, more positive than that of sound. Noises, if there are any, only reach me after crossing this silence. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

The stars in the Heavens sing a music if we only had ears to hear. The useful combinations are precisely the most beautiful, I mean those best able to charm this special sensibility that all mathematicians know. Sometimes, also, during this reflection or at other moments, Christ is present with me in person, but his presence is infinitely more real, more moving, more clear than on that first occasion when he took possession of me. It sometimes seems to me that when I am treated in so merciful a way, every sin on my part must be a mortal sin. And I am constantly committing them. However, for as to the spiritual direction of my soul, I think that God himself has taken it in hand from the start and still looks after it. What a lovely World we could live in if we would listen more frequently to this splendor! Beauty alone confers happiness on all, and under its influence every being forgets that one is limited. However, the sense of limitations is crucial to our creating beauty. We actually create beauty out of the endeavor to come to terms with the paradox on one hand of freedom and on the other of destiny. Our limits come from being both nature and spirit, finite and infinite, objective and subjective. No one knows this struggle better than the artists, be they painters or musicians or sculptors or dancers or any other figures in the arts. Sculptures or paintings or a piece of music is genuine beauty, a gift to the World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

We need to make life on this World a little better. The gentlemen had risen to see me off. I murmured my superficial farewells, and only then did the secret grip release me. I walked slowly into the formal garden beyond the pool, and would have gone up into the roaring clouds, to be as far away from the Earth as I could be. However, I discovered a new quality of life which had begun with the poppies and spread out to an awareness of the colorful and adventurous aspect of life—the aspect of beauty—which had been there all the time but which I had never noticed. I seemed released from my old compulsions: I felt empowered, freed for all kinds of activities. I brushed up on my French and found, to my initial surprise, that there was a great deal of musical and cultural life in Rocklin, that friends of different nationalities were waiting, so to speak, for me to join them. These experiences were embodied in my life, and I could live out, imprint upon my psyche, the new ways of life learned psychologically; it crystallized my new understanding of beauty. Human beings can be saved from the danger of being transformed into things. The only wat to salvation lay in going forward and creating a new society that will free people from alienation, from submission to the machine, from the fate of being dehumanized. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12

Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously. Other happenings gives us joy and afterwards peace, but in beauty these are the same experience. Understandings beauty is a way to liberate human beings from selfishness and greed, it is a way to be free to devote ourselves to the law of God and its wisdom, with no one to oppress or disturb it, and this will make us worthy of life in the World to come. In the era of God there will be neither famine nor war, neither jealousy nor strife. Earthly goods will be abundant, comforts within the reach of all. The one preoccupation of the whole World will be to know the Lord. Hence, it is beautiful that we will be very wise, we will know the things that are now concealed and will attain an understanding of our creator to the utmost capacity of the human mind. “For the Earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the water cover the sea,” reports Isaiah 11.9.  The goal of history is to enable human beings to devote themselves entirely to the study of wisdom and the knowledge of God; not solely power and luxury. The Messianic Time is one of Universal peace, absence of envy, and material abundance. Beauty is serene and at the same time exhilarating; it increases one’s sense of being alive. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12

The realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and of external utility is required. In the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of material production in the strict meaning of the term. Just as people of the past had to wrestle with nature, in order to satisfy one’s wants, in order to maintain one’s life and reproduce it, so civilized mortals have to do it, and one must do it in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. With one’s development the realm of natural necessity expands, because one’s wants increase; but at the same time the forces of production in this field cannot consist of anything else but of the fact that socialized mortals, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power; that they accomplish their task with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it. However, it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human power which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis. The increase of beauty is its fundamental premise. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12

Beauty gives us not only a feeling of wonder; it imparts to us at the same moment a timelessness, a repose—which is why we speak of beauty as being eternal. Salvation does not postulate a final eschatological solution; the discrepancy between mortals and nature remains, but the realm of necessity is brought under human control as much as possible, but always remains a realm of necessity. The goal is that development of human power which is its own end, the true realm of freedom. When the whole World is preoccupied with knowing the Lord, this is the development of human power as its own end, as it will allow us to give birth to our inner wealth. Beauty is the mystery which enchants us. Like all higher experiences of being human, beauty is dynamic; its sense of repose, paradoxically, is never dead, and if it seems to be dead, it is no longer beauty. When cannot allow everything the economist takes away from us in the way of life and humanity to be restored to us in the form of money and material wealth. The goal is not luxury and wealth, nor is it poverty; in fact, both luxury and poverty can be looked upon as a vice. However, absolute poverty, as well as being wealthy, can be conditions that give birth to or have given birth to one’s inner wealth. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12

What is this act of giving birth? Well, you do not need a uterus, it is not a physical birth and something both men and women can experience. It is the active, unalienated expression of our faculty toward the corresponding objects. All human relations to the World—seeing, feeling, desiring, acting loving—in short all the organs of one’s individuality…are in their objective action [their action in relation to the object] the appropriation of this object, the appropriation of human reality. This is not the form of appropriation in the mode of being, not in the mode of having. Let us assume that mortals to be mortals, and their relation to the World to be a human one. Then love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust, and so forth. If you wish to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person: if you wish to influence other people, you must be a person who really has a stimulating and encouraging effect upon others. Every one of your relations to mortals and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return, for instance, if you are not able, by the manifestation of yourself as a loving person, to make yourself a beloved person, then your love is impotent and a misfortune. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12

Most people in our culture suppress their reactions to beauty; it is too soul-baring. A session with a patient in therapy may illustrate our general cultural shyness in talking on this topic. I had been seeing tis particular client, a woman, once a week for a year; always she talked about some practical problem, generally about the difficulties of getting along with her husband. Though I liked her and she was a highly intelligent person who was also mild, optimistic, pleasant, quiet, and unselfish, but she was a bit too bland and unwarlike, all things considered, and her quarrels with her husband had become boring to me. It appears that her intelligence represented the operation of the reality in principle in behavior, and was responsible for characteristics as the appropriate delay of impulse-expression and the effective organization of instinctual energy necessary for the attainment of goals in the World as it is. Easy accessibility of both primary process and secondary process indicated that she is a person who is both original and intelligent. This how she began by saying she was very weary, they had had visitors for a week, she was “punch drunk” and did not have much to say. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12

So I suggested, since she was so fatigued, that she try free association, simply letting whatever popped into her mind come forth. I explained Dr. Freud’s idea of free association: it is like looking out the window of a speeding train. Each view seems separated from the one before, but when you look down on the whole, as though from above, one can see it makes a meaningful landscape. She somewhat reluctantly agreed though she did not believe it would do any good. Following in a summary of the hour: The first thing that comes to me, I stopped my car on the way here to look at the twilight. It was just beautiful, the purple hues with the green hills behind them…it is the most beautiful time of the day…I believe in God, and when I see such beauty, I know there is a Divine Creator. The poets in the country I come from speak of this time of day when they are writing the most important things—when they write of love and so on. In the twilight I used to go to the beach all alone, it was lovely. This time of day would be a good time to die, a good time to be alone…I should have been a poet [smiling]…This time at twilight does not last long. It seems to say something about true love—it cannot be actualized. [Silence] #RandolphHarris 7 of 12

I would like to die at this time…It is so peaceful here in your office…I keep noticing the beauty outside the window…My mother called from [another country]…called all the way to tell me she has a cold…That ruins the beauty…My mother always wanted me to notice the beauty…to enjoy the World. The bay is so beautiful…I stop each time I drive toward the bridge…San Francisco seems unreal, like a fata morgana…I am part of it…it feels so good, I want to melt into it. People come up to me, want me to take their picture with their camera, they stand right in front so they block out all the picture [she laughs]. Maybe I think other people ruin the scene. When I was in the army [in another country], I would go swimming in the ocean at twilight, alone. It was wonderful. Then the waves drove me out—they seemed like monsters coming after me. The mountains behind the ocean are great in twilight, but they become monsters—big and dark—when night falls. [End of summary] At the conclusion of the hour I asked her how she felt. “Somewhat relaxed…like when I go to a good movie. My friends want to talk about it, but not I…This scene here [looking out my windows] is pure beauty.” She then expressed her fear that she had said nothing today, maybe it was all superficial talk. I assured her that no topics could be more important than beauty, God, death. I added that I thought it was the most profound hour we had ever had. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12

This person is like the majority of people in our Western culture: we are shy about them, they are too persona. We talk about the view, anything to avoid the personal statement. And if we do let out such feelings we apologize for them, as this woman did in saying she was afraid it was all superficial talk. It is fascinating how much beauty preoccupied this young woman, and yet she had never mentioned it before. Each of us can give as examples of beauty only those experiences which have impressed us. Beauty is, to me, listening to Aaliyah’s self-titled album or Arimin van Buuren’s A State of Trance, or Murray Perahia play a Mozart concerto. Beauty is standing under the grape arbor among lilacs in May when the air is heavy with their fragrance, faint for a moment and then filling the air suddenly again as though to intoxicate us. My own experience of beauty has generally been of the simple things—a walk through the pine forests beside the lake, snow in Winter weighing down the limbs of spruce trees till they touch the ground. When the limpid sky turns to pink and the pink to orange and then a fiery red as the Sun rises over the mountains like a God to change the whole face of the Earth, that is what I consider beautiful. The greatest block to a person’s development of courage is one’s having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in one’s own powers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12

Early in the morning in Summers in Rocklin Trails I walk out of my house on the far edge of the meadow as the morning mist hangs in the air. The Sun rises and its yellow rays rest on the mist. There is no human sound, only the song of thrushes in the bushes. On every blade of grass in the meadow there is a pearl-drop of dew, and as I pick a blade and look more closely I see on each pearl-drop its spectrum of color reflecting the Sun, creating a meadow filled with trillions of tiny sparkling rainbows. However, in our culture, in our discursive language, we cannot talk too much of beauty. Thus a person is unable to know what one believes, let alone stand up for it, or what one’s own powers are, if one has had all along to live up to some role of oneself in one’s parents’ eyes—an image one carries on and perpetuates with oneself. One’s courage is a vacuum before one very begins to act, since it has no real basis within the individual. True, in poetry or in painting or in music we can communicate the experience. However, beauty is a subjective vision at the same moment as it is an objective datum, and we need to respect this wholeness, this union of experience. This is why, when we are before an image of beauty, we instinctively remain silent. We look and we listen. When we talk too much about beauty, we are objectifying it, putting it outside ourselves, destroying the inner vision and reducing it to objective chatter. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12

We must preserve the capacity for wonder—which is the awareness that we can never fully explain the inner experience of beauty. There is also a cultural reason why we do not talk much about beauty. Our culture worships change. We become bored instead of serene; and how then can we appreciate the sense of eternity, the timelessness of this experience? In our age time is money; we construct great buildings only to tear them down in seventy-five years. We erect the tallest edifice in the World, which destroy the previously lacelike loveliness of the skyline of New York, which was one of the wonders of the World. Our age is not one in which beauty has a firm place at the Board of Directors’ meeting. We must nevertheless, being human, communicate by words as much as we can. Normally when a child can take each step in differentiation from one’s parents, each step in becoming oneself, without unbearable anxiety. Just as one learns to climb the steps despite the pain and frustration of falling back time and again, and eventually succeeds with a laugh of joy, so one normally feels out one’s own psychological independence step by step. Aware of one’s parents’ love, and aware of a security present in proportion to one’s degree of immaturity, one can take the occasional crises with parents and such crises as going to school, and one’s growing courage is not overwhelmed. One is not required to stand alone to a greater degree than one is prepared to do. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12

 However, if the parents need, like the mother above, to force the child out of their own anxiety, one’s task is made that much more difficult. Parents who have inner, often unconscious, doubts about their own strength tend to demand that their children be especially courageous, independent and aggressive; they may buy the son boxing gloves, push him into competitive groups at an early age, and in other ways insist that the child be the man they inwardly feel they are not. Generally parents who push the child, like those who overprotect one, are showing in actions which speak louder than words their own lack of confidence in him. However, just as no child will develop courage by being overprotected, so no child will develop it by being pushed. One may develop obstinacy or bullying tendencies. However, one’s courage grows only as an outcome of one’s confidence, generally unverbalized, in one’s own powers and one’s indigenous qualities as a human being. This confidence gets its base from one’s parents’ love for the individual and their belief in one’s potentialities. What one needs is neither overprotection nor pushing, but help to utilize and develop one’s own power, and most of all to feel that one’s parents see one as a person in one’s own right and love one for one’s own particular capacities and values. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12